Spitzbergen enjoys an invincible advantage at present, as its wild life is being carefully preserved. But once Labrador is put under conservation the odds will be reversed. And I what is true of Labrador in general is much truer still of the Canadian Labrador. Here is a country which is actually south of London, which is only 2000 miles from England, 1000 from New York, and 500 from Quebec; which stands beside one of the most frequented of ocean highways; and which has a labyrinth of islands, a maze of rivers, and an untamed hinterland, all formed by Nature for wild "zoos", preserves and open hunting grounds. And here, too, all over the civilized world, are city-bound men, turning more and more to Nature for health and recreation, and willing to spend increasingly large sums for what they seek and find. Surely, it is only the common sense of statesmanship to bring this country and those men together, in the near future, under conditions which are best for both, by making the Canadian Labrador an attractive land of life and not a hopelessly repellant land of death.

One good, long look ahead to-day, and immediate action following, will bring the No-Man's-Land of the Canadian Labrador into its rightful place within the fellowship of the Province and Dominion. You will never find cause for vain regret. There is a sound basis of material value in the products of the coast already; and material value is always increased by conservation. But there is more than material value involved. We still have far too much wanton destruction of wild life in Canada, not only among those who have ignorantly grown up to it, but among the well-to-do and presumably well-educated sham sportsmen who go into any unprotected wilds simply to indulge their lust of slaughter to the full. Both these classes will be stopped in their abominations and shown a better way; for whenever man is taught a lesson in conservation he rises to a higher plane in his attitude towards all his humbler fellow-beings, and eventually becomes a sportsman-naturalist and true lover of the wilds.

Then, but not till then, he will see such a drama of Creation along the Canadian Labrador as the whole world can never show elsewhere. On the one hand lies the illimitable past, a past which actually existed before the earliest of living creatures: on the other, the promise of a great human future. The past is in the hills, the true, the only "everlasting hills of time"; for they are of the old, the immeasurably old, azoic rock of the Laurentians, which forms the roots of other mountains, and which here alone appears to-day, on the face of a young Earth, the same as at the birth of Life itself. The future lies within the ships that sail the offing of these hills, crowded with those hosts of immigration who are so eager to become a part of what may be a mighty nation. And there, between and round the ships and hills, in sea and sky and on the land, our kindred of the wild are linking these vastly different ages close together in what should be a present paradise. Shall one, short, heedless generation break that whole chain of glorious life and make that paradise a desert?